Ukraine’s Attorney General Resigns Amid Project Dodging Scandal

By Yuliia Dysa, Max Hunder

KYIV (Reuters) – Ukraine’s Attorney General Andriy Kostin said on Tuesday he had resigned to take responsibility for a scandal in which dozens of officials are alleged to have abused their positions to receive disability status and avoid military service.

Kostin’s resignation came after a meeting of the national security and defense council, where officials discussed how to crack down on corruption and loopholes used to get draft deferments.

It was not immediately clear whether Kostin’s resignation would have an impact on Ukraine’s efforts to hold Russia accountable for its invasion and subsequent war crimes that Kiev, its allies and the International Criminal Court accuse Moscow of.

Recently, Kostin’s office has been rocked by allegations that dozens of local officials, including prosecutors, allegedly misused their positions to obtain disability status.

“The Prosecutor General must take political responsibility for the situation in Ukraine’s tax authorities,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote in a strong statement posted on social media after the council meeting.

Kostin’s resignation statement followed minutes later. The prosecutor called the situation surrounding false disability diagnoses “clearly amoral” and agreed with Zelenskiy on the need for personal responsibility.

“In this situation, I believe it is right to announce my resignation from the position of Attorney General.”

PUBLIC ANGER

The prosecutor’s office faced the brunt of public anger over the scandal after a Ukrainian journalist published a story last week saying 50 prosecutors in the western Khmelnytskyi region had been registered as disabled.

Kostin subsequently ordered an investigation, which he said had found that the number of disabled prosecutors in the region was 61, and that 50 of them had been registered as disabled before the war.

“It is very important to establish why they were granted disability status, because the proportion of such employees in the Khmelnytskyi region is very high,” he said.

The chief prosecutor’s resignation still needs to be approved by parliament, where Zelenskiy’s party has a majority. After the president’s public call for accountability, it seemed overwhelmingly likely that parliament would pass it.

“By the way, it’s not only prosecutors. There are hundreds of cases of obviously unjustified disability (status) among customs officials and prosecutors, in the pension fund system and in local administrations,” Zelenskiy said in his evening speech .

“All of this needs to be dealt with carefully and promptly.”

Zelenskiy ordered his cabinet to urgently draft a law reforming the disability assessment system so that existing medical commissions are disbanded by the end of 2024.

An executive order posted on Zelenskiy’s website after Tuesday’s meeting stipulated that the commissions’ decisions should be checked within three months by a newly created task force.

Ukraine’s domestic security service, the SBU, said on Tuesday that 64 members of medical commissions had been named as suspects in criminal investigations in 2024, and nine more had been tried and found guilty.

(Reporting by Yuliia Dysa and Max Hunder; Writing by Max Hunder; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Hugh Lawson)